After reading that the restaurant routinely has an hour-plus wait time, we decided to try to beat the rush by going at 2:30 on Sunday and patted ourselves on the back for our cleverness. We were rewarded by a swift kick in the face of reality when, upon arrival, there were buttloads of other clever people who had gotten there before us and now the wait was an hour and a half. An hour and a half to go sit in a restaurant the size of my living room and pay $9 a pound to shuck crawdads for as long as we could stand it.
The Boiling Crab sets new visitors up for disappointment. If you wait an hour and a half for something - ANYTHING - you expect that when you get it, it is going to be pretty damn exciting. Perhaps even the best thing you've ever seen/eaten/done/ridden. How in God's name can a plastic bag of boiled relatives of the cockroach stand a chance? Granted, they are covered in a sauce that Yelp reviewers claim is akin to crack in its addictive qualities. But still, they aren't going to crack themselves open so you can get at the tender meats inside, and therein lies the root of the problem.
I don't mind getting messy in the name of shoveling delicious epicurean treats in my belly. However. These crawdaddies came swimming in a sea of chili seasoned garlic butter, and they weren't too keen on coming out of their shells without a fight. Plus, I had no experience in dealing with getting into a crawdad. So it took a few trials and errors to get a rhythm going that would minimize the crawdad juices sprayed on me and my companions. Add to that, those babies were spicy, so after ten minutes in, I was covered in sauce, crawdad guts, and snots and still wasn't getting any closer to fullness because the meat was the size of a peanut once you finally pulled it out.
In retrospect, I should not have ordered the two pound bag of crawdads. I know many of my decisions are faulty at best and made like this one. I wasn't sure I liked crawdads and had never in my life encountered a whole one before, but I knew that two pounds was more than one and therefore that's what I wanted. I think at some point, my battle with the crawdads became more of a test of will rather than a real desire to eat any more crawdads. My fingers were shaking and my face was spattered, but dammit, I was going to finish what I started.
I began foregoing the claws entirely and focusing just on the little curled up tail. If you've ever had to remove the meat from a lobster tail then you can understand what pulling apart a crawdad is like, only performed on a 1/20 scale. If the meat from a lobster tail pairs nicely with a grilled steak, then the meat from a single crawdad pairs equally well with a bacon bit. I began to hoard my tail meat in the hopes of having one last satisfying portion at the end of my endeavors. After shucking perhaps 10 crawdads, I had two tablespoons of meat. I don't care how awesome the sauce is, I didn't pay $18 to go home and have to eat a hamburger because my 1/4 cup of crawdad came with 1.9 lbs of shells.
In closing, unless you have more coordination that I have (probable) and more finesse in excavating the meat from crustaceans (certain), I would not recommend the Boiling Crab. Not only will your clothes get stained and your face get soiled, but you will likely have to stop on your way home to get some "real" food (pupusas).
